I've been reading a LOT of X-Men stuff lately due to working on a respect thread, and I have to wonder what is going on. Some people might say it's nostalgia, but I challenge them to go back and read stuff like Claremont's run during the Outback years and Inferno. Even Morrison's run on NXM or Whedon's Astonishing. The characterisation is solid. The dialogue is witty. No, they weren't perfect, but you'd never put one of them down and wish you hadn't wasted money on them.

We've had good X-Men arcs and writers in the last few years, but it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack at times due to all the piles of shit we've been getting.

Agree? Disagree? Genuinely curious to see if anyone has an opinion in favour of the current state of the books.

The state of x-men pretty bad, I think Marvel do not care that much about it because no longer the cash cow it use to be in the 90s (could be the result of all the disney movies but who knows)

Since second coming nothing good came out of the X-Men, I was not a big fan of AvX and Bendis's time on X-Men, I found just a huge headache/boredom with all the time travelling and talk of mutant revolution by cyclops that went nowhere...

Can't believe I didn't see this before. Yeah, the X-Men have it rough right now. And ****ING HUMBERTO RAMOS isn't helping anything with that terrible artwork.

I've mentioned some of the common problems several times(dumb new mutants/Bendis/arcs that went nowhwere), but I think another problem is this whole "hated and feared" angle. It's not the concept itself, but rather most writer's inability to do anything credible with it. It usually just amounts to the Marvel denizens behaving in outlandish, unbelievable ways towards the mutants. It just strains credibility when you read it.

I think a better approach for most writers would be what Whedon did: just treat the X-Men like regular super heroes/action heroes. It worked for Remender in X-Force too.

Bendis's intentions are in the right place I guess, but he just doesn't write good X-characters. Bobby and Kitty are like...passable at times, but he tries to turn everyone into some sitcom comedy archetype. It's ridiculous. Filling up the panels with "witty" zingers is not good characterization.

I'll probably post more later. This current state of the mutants upsets me too. X-Men are what got me into comics in the first place. Seeing them like this is just...sad.